RealID – The End of Anonymity on WoW Forums

Activision Blizzard, the masterminds behind the incredibly successful MMORPG, World of Warcraft, have recently announced they would be adding a functionality to their battle.net and worldofwarcraft.com forums that would effectively destroy all anonymity from their forums. The RealID system would show the real name of every character on every account that belonged to that individual, meaning no matter what character or game account they were on, anyone would readily have access to their real name.

This sparked a massive negative response within the community, and the newly announced features were ridiculed everywhere: forums, web comics, blogs, WoW discussion boards, and every communicative outlet for gamers essentially. This uproar caused Blizzard to rethink their design, and quickly announced they would be removing the identifying aspects of RealID, instead making those details available only to people that the customer would allow. Way to go team.